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Meet Your Neighbor: Witter shares history through his lens

Sheri Trusty, Correspondent
Published 10:00 a.m. ET July 28, 2018

Port Clinton grad was a military photographer

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Terry Witter displays cameras from several eras in his home, including this vintage portrait camera that was used at Fachman Studios in Port Clinton. Witter collected his favorite photos for a book, “A Slice of My Life…The World According to Witter.”(Photo: Sheri Trusty/Correspondent)Buy Photo

PORT CLINTON - Terry Witter spent the last several months working on a book highlighting his photographic career, from Port Clinton High School to Vietnam and beyond.

The book, “A Slice of My Life…The World According to Witter,” depicts favorite photos from his lifetime work as a military photographer.

Although he is writing the book as a family history record for his children and grandchildren, the work is more than that. It tells the story of a Port Clinton boy who found a trade he loved and through that passion recorded some of the most poignant moments in American history.

Witter was a freshman at Port Clinton High School when he was chosen to train to become the school’s yearbook photographer. He attended a one-week seminar at Ohio University for students on their schools’ yearbook committees, and the rest he learned by himself.

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A young Vietnamese girl inspects Witter’s Graflex 4x5 Speed Graphic camera in this photo Witter took during the Vietnam War. When he was serving in Vietnam, his mother often mailed lollipops to him to distribute to local children.(Photo: Sheri Trusty/Correspondent)

“Dick Celek was the yearbook advisor and became a lifelong friend. He told me he could show me how to use the camera, but he couldn’t teach me how to take a photo,” Witter said. “He sent me down to the library and told me to pick photos in Look or Life magazines and do my best to duplicate them. That taught me how to learn from the greatest photographers. Unknown to me, I was learning composition.”

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This photo of a Vietnamese boy taken by Terry Witter was originally published in the Pacific Stars and Stripes during the Vietnam War and has become one of his most famous photos. In the photo, the boy is holding medicine dispensed to his mother by American medical personnel. “I kept noticing him ducking in and out, and I knew it’d make a good photo,” Witter said.(Photo: Sheri Trusty/Correspondent)

The Vietnam War was raging across the ocean at that time. Witter enlisted with the Air Force and asked recruitment officials how to become a photographer in the military.

“They rolled their eyes,” he said.

Nevertheless, at boot camp, Witter took a photography aptitude test and passed. He was assigned to photography duty and sent to Forbes Air Force Base.

“Nine months later, I was in Vietnam,” he said.

Witter shot occasional war footage, but much of his work involved daily military and Vietnamese civilian life. While in Vietnam, he visited orphanages, a leper colony, and medical clinics. His work was used in several military publications, including Stars and Stripes, and a few were featured in Port Clinton Daily News, a forerunner of the Port Clinton News Herald.

“When I was in Vietnam, my photo was published in my hometown paper. I thought I’d hit it big time,” he said.

Living in a foreign culture so far from home, Witter gained an appreciation for the sweetness of his small hometown.

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Terry Witter displays several of the cameras he has collected over the years, including a few once owned by his grandfather, who was also a photographer.(Photo: Sheri Trusty/Correspondent)

“At Christmastime, I probably got 30 packages. I had to write my mom to ask who some of them were from. I didn’t know them,” he said.

In Vietnam, Witter used a Graflex 4x5 Speed Graphic, a bulky camera that required a sequence of steps for each photo. While many soldiers carried ammunition and other survival supplies in their cargo pants, Witter’s pockets were full of film and flashbulbs.

“It was a long process (to take a photo), because it was a camera that had to hold up to the temperatures and weather over there,” he said.

Unlike many military personnel who returned from Vietnam, Witter has mostly good memories of his service there.

“I always said I was fortunate, because I didn’t have to set up a claymore mine to protect myself. A lot of my friends have harrowing memories,” he said.

Witter served in the Air Force from 1968 to 1972, in the Navy from 1975 to 1991, and as a civilian photographer for the military from 1991 until his retirement in1996. During his post-Vietnam years, he was sent on photography assignments all over the world and was occasionally offered freelance work on the side.

He lived in Italy for six years and traveled on assignment to places such as Italy, Cuba, Spain and Greece. He photographed Russian naval admirals on Malcolm Forbes’ yacht, the Blue Angels, boxer Joe Louis, baseball legend Joe DiMaggio, and Miss Ohio Pageant contestants.

As Witter looked back on his life to write the book, an underlying theme emerged.

“I’m proof that a kid can do anything they want, if they work for it,” he said. “I got to do really cool stuff.”